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Schools ought to be more accountable for students’ educational achievement. To that end, President Bush’s education plan proposes to make accountability enforceable: If a school fails to make progress in educating disadvantaged students for three years, parents of these students could use federal Title I funds to move their children to an alternative public or private school.

As I understand it, there's almost 14 million children uninsured today. -- Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), January 9, 1997 We have called this news conference today to announce that it is Democrats' number one health priority this year to reverse those trends by guaranteeing access to health care for those 10.5 million children who currently lack coverage. -- Sen. Daschle, January 16, 1997

“Innovation, not litigation” has become a catchphrase among Citizens for a Sound Economy activists. While normally uttered in the context of the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft, the phrase captures a fundamental value with many applications. For example, consider the proper enforcement of copyright in a digital world. The communications infrastructure of the Internet includes file-sharing software and portals that, when coupled with advanced compression technology, allow copyrighted works to be pirated at never-before-seen levels.

If the tax burden on America’s workers is not reduced this year, one has to wonder if substantive tax relief will ever become a reality. For four consecutive years, the government has taken more from the wallets of the American people than it has spent on all government services combined.

As the Clinton administration draws to a close, it is appropriate to ask whether the past eight years of renewed antitrust activism have helped or harmed consumers. An excellent test case is the June 1997 preliminary injunction killing the proposed Staples-Office Depot merger, which was at the time arguably the most significant antitrust case brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during the 1990s.

Over the past year, gasoline prices have soared, rising from an average of $1.03 per gallon in January 1999 to almost $1.60 in July 2000.1 For several weeks, some areas of the Midwest saw gasoline cost more than $2.00 per gallon.

On July 11, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a rule finalizing major revisions to the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program, a long-dormant section of the Clean Water Act. The new rule applies to an estimated 20,000 water bodies throughout the United States, which, it is claimed, fail to meet water quality standards. The new TMDL rule represents perhaps the largest expansion of EPA’s regulatory authority America has ever seen. Virtually all land use in the United States could fall under the scope of a regulation of which most Americans have never heard.

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) recommendations in Privacy Online: Fair Information Practices in the Electronic Marketplace have replaced the heat and humidity as this summer’s most stifling climatic development. The FTC’s suggestion that legislation is needed to supplement industry self-regulation disregards private-sector developments and long-established American values.

Privacy is this year’s ubiquitous issue. It can be found on bookshelves, magazine covers, the evening news, and in campaign speeches. Privacy applies to different aspects of people’s lives, from medical records to financial records to shopping habits. Definitions of privacy vary, but it might be best described as the control we have over information about ourselves.

No section of the tax code is more unfair and more dangerous to our entrepreneurial economy than the death tax. With rates as high as 55 percent, the death tax punishes people who build a successful business or farm and try to leave that legacy to their kids. Moreover, the death tax’s modest contributions to the federal Treasury are dwarfed by its staggering impact on the U.S. economy. Repealing the death tax is the right thing to do for American family farms, businesses, and the new economy